Perichole

Offenbach’s La Périchole (1868) will never cease to delights music lovers of all persuasions. Marc Minkowski – long one of the composer’s prophets – was keen to pay tribute to him with this world premiere recording on period instruments, in the company of the young school of French singers, including the bewitching Aude Extrémo, the dashing Stanislas de Barbeyrac and the hilarious Alexandre Duhamel. Combining fashionable rhythms with the most unexpected touches of folklore, the score is a veritable flood of hit numbers. How can one not be swept away by the insolence of the Seguidilla, the frenzy of the Bolero or the furious rhythm of the Prison Trio? Never before, perhaps, had Offenbach gone so far in caricaturing political leaders – nor used drunkenness to resolve the imbroglio of inextricable sentimental relationships. And indeed, the ‘Tipsy Arietta’ is one of the composer's best-known numbers. Cheers!

Offenbachs La Périchole (1868) will never cease to delight music lovers of all persuasions. Marc Minkowski long one of the composers prophets was keen to pay tribute to him with this world premiere recording on period instruments, in the company of the young school of French singers, including the bewitching Aude Extrémo, the dashing Stanislas de Barbeyrac and the hilarious Alexandre Duhamel. Combining fashionable rhythms with the most unexpected touches of folklore, the score is a veritable flood of hit numbers. How can one not be swept away by the insolence of the Seguidilla, the frenzy of the Bolero or the furious rhythm of the Prison Trio? Never before, perhaps, had Offenbach gone so far in caricaturing political leaders nor used drunkenness to resolve the imbroglio of inextricable sentimental relationships. And indeed, the Tipsy Arietta is one of the composer's best-known numbers. Cheers!

Michel Plasson is one of the most important French conductors from the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He is well known for his interpretations of French opera, particularly those of Gounod and Massenet. He has also received praise for his work in the choral music of Duruflé and Fauré, and the orchestral works of Magnard, Ravel, and other French composers.

He was born in Cologne, but it was in Paris that Jacques Offenbach achieved fame. A special feature of this 30-CD collection are star-studded recordings in both French and German of his most celebrated operettas – works that overflow with joie de vivre and satirical wit – and of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, an opera that daringly fuses fantasy, comedy and tragedy. It also includes irresistibly stylish performances of such tempting rarities as Les Brigands, Pomme d’Api, Monsieur Choufleuri and Mesdames de la Halle.

The music of Jacques Offenbach defines the intoxicating, hedonistic spirit of Paris in the mid-19th century. Above all, there is the galop infernal from Orphée aux enfers, often known simply as ‘the can-can’. That Offenbach also had a gift for lyricism is clear from his haunting, lilting Barcarolle, a highlight of his opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann. Both pieces feature in this irresistible collection of operetta, opera and orchestral music. Alongside many treasures from the Warner Classics catalogue, it contains the first-time release of Musette for cello and orchestra in performance by Edgar Moreau with Les Forces Majeures and Raphaël Merlin.

This selection of pieces from Offenbach operettas (and one opera) raises a question: why hasn't Bulgarian mezzo-soprano Vesselina Kasarova made more of a specialty of comic roles in her recordings? Her operatic discography, with very few exceptions, consists of serious characters, but the flair with which she performs these arias and ensembles demonstrates a real comic gift, and that's something of a rarity in opera stars. (Her stage roles, in fact, are pretty well balanced between serious and comic operas, with a fair number of Rossini, Mozart, and Offenbach comedies in her repertoire.) The current disc at least begins to rectify the gap in her recorded legacy.